Whats faster? 1X10,000rpm or 2X7200

[Chris2wire]

Yeah...

SATA, one 40g 10,000rpm hard drive or two 40g 7200rpm hard drives running in stripe-raid mode.

Assume same company and same buffer size

 

[Mojoed]

By faster do you mean sequential reads or random access times? I guess this depends on what you are doing with your system.

7200RPM 40GB drives have slower STR's and overall performance than modern drives due to lower areal density and smaller buffers. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a 7200RPM 40GB drive with an 8MB buffer. So you'd be looking at a 2MB buffer for the 7,200 RPM drives, compared with a 1 platter, 8MB buffer for the 10k drive. (I'm assuming 36GB Raptor)

The effectiveness of RAID0 has been hotly debated in recent times. Check here to learn more about RAID0. That being said, I'm sure a RAID0 configuration with these drives would be faster in certain tests over the 10k drive, but is it worth doubling your chance of a disk failure? Personally I'd go for the 10k drive and forget about RAID0. Again this all depends on what you are doing. If you are doing mainly video editing RAID0 may be worth it. Otherwise, I'd stick with the 10k.

 

[Sunner]

Depends on the models and such, but assuming you mean 1 Raptor or 2 modern 7200 drives, the 7200's would win in STR, while the Raptor would crush them in access times.
For most stuff, access times is far more important, STR is mostly important when moving around large amounts of data, such as video files, isos, etc.

 

[RSMemphis]

For 90% of work on the computer, the 10k drive will be better (and the MTBF will be higher as well than for 7.2k RAID0).
As Sunner said, video editing may be the one of the things where a RAID0 is better.

One other thing, one thing that kills performance is copying data on the same drive. If you have an application with high throughput both on the input and output, it's best to have two separate drives, one acting as input, one as output. Any video encoding I do, I do that way, and I have seen 5-10% performance improvements.